The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

Oracle's SPARC M6 processor features 12 cores.

Oracle’s engineering strategy of forging tight connections between the software and hardware elements of its stack—the better to both accelerate and uncomplicate customers’ IT operations—was evident everywhere at OpenWorld on Tuesday. In the morning, Oracle software chief Thomas Kurian shared the stage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center with his hardware counterpart, John Fowler.

Their keynote, entitled “Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together: Simplifying and Enabling IT for a Cloud, Big Data, and Customer Driven World,” delivered on all the elements promised in its title.

Kurian, Oracle executive vice president for product development, spotlighted 10 cloud-service announcements, including Database as a Service. Fowler, Oracle executive vice president of systems, followed with a look under the hood of the company’s extreme-performance engineered systems, which will make those cloud services figuratively sing.

The cohesiveness of Oracle’s approach, which is setting the technological bar for the datacenter of the future, is fascinating, but also a mouthful. Accordingly, OracleVoice is its splitting coverage of Tuesday’s news into two posts. John Foley takes you through the cloud news in "Oracle Expands In The Cloud With 10 New Services." I’ll continue this post, focusing on the engineered systems.

Exadata In The House

Fowler’s portion of Tuesday’s keynote carried forward the performance theme around which OpenWorld has revolved since Sunday evening. That’s when Oracle CEO Larry Ellison delivered his traditional welcome keynote. He used the opportunity to deliver what amounted to a geeky technical course on the new in-memory option, which accelerates the performance of Oracle Database 12c by orders of magnitude.

“We’re focused on taking in-memory computing to the next level,” Fowler said. Several engineered systems product lines, which do precisely that, are already part of Oracle’s product portfolio. Among the best known are the Exadata Database Machine, Exalytics In-Memory Machine, and Oracle SuperCluster.

A new machine with unprecedented performance joined the family on Sunday, courtesy of Ellison, in the form of the Big Memory Machine officially called the Oracle SuperCluster M6-32. It's powered by the latest and greatest processor to emerge from Fowler’s team, the SPARC M6. The chip has 12 cores—twice that of the current-generation M5, and it can execute 96 threads per processor. “Oracle has invested very significantly in silicon innovation,” Fowler said in his keynote. “We are very aggressive in what we want to do in the silicon space; this enables us to differentiate our offerings.”

Such determination harkens back to the tumultuous period of silicon innovation that was the 1990s. Back then, numerous manufacturers went to market with processors—typically, but not always, RISC-based--positioned as upscale alternatives to commodity computing. Most are long defunct.

In enterprise computing, the RISC tradition today lives largely in the SPARC-based engineered systems from Oracle and partner Fujitsu. For its part, IBM continues to fields boxes based on its superscalar POWER architecture. (Though it's separate from this RISC discussion, I want to make clear that Intel's Xeon, derived from the company's Netburst architecture, has a significant presence in servers, including systems sold by Oracle.)

Big Memory Machine: Oracle SuperCluster M6-32.

Yet it’s precisely the continued SPARC innovation emanating from Fowler’s team that forms the hardware backbone of Oracle’s engineered systems strategy. Philosophically, Fowler said he believes in doubling performance with each successive generation. That's driven by Ellison's vision of extreme performance; the Oracle CEO is continually challenging Fowler's team to take SPARC to new heights.

“We deliver on extreme performance, ease of deployment, and extreme efficiency,” he said, speaking about Oracle’s engineered systems. “We now have thousands of customers where our engineered systems have become the core of their infrastructure.”

The cohesive engineering teams inside Oracle, which design those systems, have collective expertise across Oracle’s entire hardware and software stack. This enables them to innovate not just in the compute function, but also in storage and networking. The end result, Fowler said, is that “all of your applications just run better. All are accelerated by the capabilities of engineered systems.”

Under The Hood

Following Fowler’s keynote, a separate OpenWorld general session entitled “What’s New with Oracle Engineered Systems,” provided additional insight. The session was hosted by David Lawler, Oracle senior vice president of systems product management and strategy.

Juan Loaiza, senior vice president of systems technology, discussed the Exadata Database Machine. Balaji Yelamanchili, senior vice president for business analytics products, talked about the Exalytics In-Memory Machine. And Ganesh Ramamurthy, vice president of software development, weighed in on the Oracle SuperCluster.

Loaiza affirmed that Exadata is optimized to serve as an ideal cloud platform for databases. Key technical attributes included for that purpose include flash memory for low-latency data access and high-capacity storage to handle very large databases. External communications are speeded up via the use of ultrafast, Infiniband-based networking.

“This is the platform of the future,” Loaiza said.

Yelamanchili showcased the new Exalytics In-Memory Machine T5-8, which scales up to take analytics-insights performance to the max. In his segment, Yelamanchili applied his business-analytics expertise to offer insights on challenges currently concerning customers. He pointed out that fast analytics requires not only fast core processing, but fast visualization and rapid response to user inputs, too.

In-memory technology is the key to accomplishing all three, he said. The reasons it’s ascendant today are both economic and technical—memory is 50X faster and 25X cheaper than it was in 2002.

Yelamanchili added that companies increasingly want to correlate business intelligence (BI) with customer sentiment. Immersive visualization, which is how patterns can be surfaced, is the way to do this. And Exalytics can tackle the task at enterprise scale.

Ramamurthy pointed to the new Oracle SuperCluster M6-32, which can be configured with up to 32 SPARC M6 processors and 32 TB of memory, as Oracle’s fastest and most scalable engineered system. It combines Oracle’s fastest compute server with Exadata Storage Servers and Exalogic software optimizations, and is ideal for large-scale database and application consolidation, as well as private cloud.

“We’ve created an infrastructure which scales up and scales out, which can solve your infrastructure and user challenges,” he said. As well, Lawler's team noted that the many enhancements incorporated into Oracle's engineered systems deliver a value proposition to customers, which gets them numerous high-end features that used to come at a premium.